


The Inconvenient Truth of Snapdragon Rum

by Euregatto



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: Dawn receives the sister-of-the-year award, Drunken Shenanigans, F/M, In which Marianne and Bog have a history, Mild Blood, Mild Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, and the love potion isn't the pinnacle of everyone's ruined day
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-02 07:25:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19194379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: “Am I making a mistake? Bedding with the Bog King behind the backs of my father and my people. How scandalous, how selfish of me—”“Someday,” he said to her, “you're gonna be queen, so none of that will matter. But right now, you're with me, and you're allowed to be as selfish as you wanna be.”





	1. chance

**Author's Note:**

> A special thanks to Jazz, who's listened quite valiantly to all of my sporadic obsessions in the last few weeks; there is no one as uniquely diligent as you.
> 
> It's a shame it took me this long to get around to watching this film, cause I'm in love with it (though I will admit, there was a lot of untapped potential). I wrote this to play with the idea of Bog and Marianne having a history before the timeline of events, but then it just turned into a story about them falling in love all over again, and Sunny doesn't sell his friends out for a love potion. I took a LOT of creative liberties. Also, apologies in advance, I'm terrible at writing accents.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this story all the same.

  

  

  

It’s the moment when the burden of another person’s life  
Seems insupportable. We want to be reborn incessantly  
But actually doing it begins—have you noticed?  
To seem redundant. Here is the life that chose you  
And the one you chose.

\- From _Art and Life_ by Robert Hass

   

  

  

  

* * *

 **i**. chance

* * *

   

   

Had she landed anywhere else, the sky above her would have been a clear indigo ignited by the limpid flames of a full moon; instead Marianne was skewed somewhere halfway between the shrub and the moss, foot caught in the twisted arm of the ferns and an acute pain in the socket of her left wing, looking up at the jagged silhouette of inevitable circumstance. Here, she realized, the sky was shielded by branches amassed into a canopy, and moonlight lanced through the few cavities it could find in the haphazard conglomeration of treetops. Rendered completely inert from the force of her landing, her eyes were open and in them the reflection of the monster above appeared like the slivered shadow on a sundial.

She said, “A-Are you going to kill me?”

The creature jerked. In the ambiance of moonlight, the amber stone in its staff glinted. She was compelled by forces beyond superficial understanding to look upon its beauty. The frigid chill of the damp forest floor began to grab hold; she thought of the warmth of the amber, and how it exorcised the impressions of all the memories she would have liked to reflect upon before she died as the cold, rotted dirt drank from her royal blood. In some places in the fields, she heard rumors that fairy blood turns to stardust when left to dry. Unsettled, she weakly put her hand to her wound and applied not-enough pressure.

“You're trespassin’,” the creature said, “so the laws of the land mandate I do.” He lowered down to observe her closely, blue irises emanating in the night like some kind of color that was hollowed out by time—a clear crystal hum through an old flute. His eyes roamed her body, absorbing the sight of her injuries. “Though I suppose capital punishment is unnecessary. You’d be dead before you made it back to my castle.”

It occurred to her that she was in a territory beyond her own. The thought had lingered distantly before now, when she opened her eyes and first saw that everything looked crepuscular and wrong—and with it came the realization that rose as an acidic burn in the back of her throat: _I’m going to die in the Dark Forest._ The emotional pain of it was secondhand. She sank her other palm into the loamy patch of grass and moss and soil, fingers sliding in between old leaves and rotting flower petals, and tried to conjure up a memory, even as her mind slipped dangerously into the dark—Dawn was there, sprawled out at her side in the meadow, laughing about a frivolous story of brownies and misplaced hand jars like the world around them was an inconsequential place. That was the last time Marianne saw her sister, before—

 _Before_ …

“Will you do me a favor?” she uttered, and the creature tilted his head. “Please, return my body to the fields, and tell my father this was…”

“You're bein’ dramatic,” the beast said thinly.

Marianne felt the heat of him as he drew close, and then—his arms, one under her knees and the other around her lower back, clawed hands curling against her skin. She gasped, partially in surprise and mostly from the guttural ache that was renewed in her side. “Wh-wh-what are you doing?” she stammered out, though she was far too enervated to struggle against the creature’s hold as he lifted her from the ground and against his chest.

“Do you wish to be left here?”

“Uh, no, but—that doesn’t—”

Marianne braced herself with a hand against his chest, where her fingers fell into rigid grooves of bark. Beneath the rugged panoply was the murmur of his heart. She didn’t miss the way it tremored when her digits spread out to support her weight as she shifted inwards, closer to the creature, until her head almost, _almost_ , fell into the crevice of his neck.

“Un— _hand_ me,” she said, uselessly resisting his strength. “I am Princess Marianne, first heir to the Fairy Kingdom, and if you so much as misplace _one_ hair on my head my father will—”

“Ah, so it was not a _mere_ fairy who breached our borders, but the _princess_ _herself_.”

Marianne grit her teeth together. She realized how feeble her attempt at intimidating him had been, and due to the preexisting context of a technicality by law, she had just admitted to the severity of her situation. “I—” She swallowed drily. Her torso throbbed right under her ribs, where the skin had been flayed open by the sharp talons of an ill-timed falcon which mistook her, quite understandably, for dinner. She chose to concentrate on the creature’s shadowed face, all his details masked by the darkness. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t.” He flexed his wings outwards, and in the dim lighting the membrane refracted the chalky color of the moon’s rays, kindling a rainbow through the prism. Marianne bit back her urge to run her fingertips over the intricate divots between the segments; they looked terribly frail but were impossibly strong if they lifted the two of them with such ease.

“Is that why you haven’t killed me?” she asked him. “Or…eaten me, or whatever it is you do?”

The creature tilted his chin up like a coin toss and huffed out what could’ve been a laugh, had he practiced more. “I wouldn’t think of eatin’ you, ‘less I wanted to start a war. Besides, you're much too scrawny to satisfy my appetite.”

“Then will you at least say where you’re taking me?”

“Home,” he told her, his tone indicating neither hers nor his. “Consider this self-interest. If the queen-heir were to perish in my forest, there would be consequences—and I will protect my people to every extent necessary, as you must surely understand.”

They lurched into the air. Marianne knew there would be no further chances to pursue the conversation, so she braced against the creature, and didn’t push her luck.

   

  

  

* * *

  

  

  

Dawn was inconsolable. From her perch on a plateau overlooking the edge of the Dark Forest, she helplessly watched her father’s soldiers scour the underbrush for what would assuredly be her sister’s corpse while Sunny downheartedly tried to soothe her with an ushered rendition of how every-little-thing was gonna be alright. Though most days his presence was a reassurance, Dawn failed to find ease in the current moment of prevalent stress; this was her fault, after all. She had flown too close to the sky and was exposed at the emergent layer of the tree line.

Marianne hadn’t been there before the avid materialized from the canopy, but she was a superior flyer and appeared like the sudden expulsion of a spark from flint to take the brunt of the falcon’s strike. Now she was somewhere in the understory of the Dark Forest where she had plummeted, that flame, Dawn began to believe, snuffed out.

Their father paced along the substantial demesne at the forest’s edge, back and forth, the scales of his wings piqued by exasperation. His soldiers were in the confines of the woods, seeking out signs of their nobility’s scion; Roland, she saw, was lifted high on the peak of Chipper’s tail, more westward, with the triplets flittering about the vicinity.

 _This is my fault_ , Dawn thought solemnly, _it’s always my fault—_

“Marianne!” the king exclaimed, jumping to the sudden motion of the nearby underbrush. Dawn didn’t miss the usual black shape that seemed to rise out of sight behind the commotion, back towards the clandestine forest, and squinted to get a better look—but it was only Marianne who filled her vision, who stumbled into the field with her hand clutching the mangled flesh that once composed her lower torso, who gave her father an a-okay signal—and then promptly fainted in the tall grass.

  

  

  

* * *

  

  

  

Marianne learned something during her time in the infirmary, the kind of unknowing reality check that glanced off the barrier of her oblivious mind for the last year, she was sure, until someone else forced it through. Luka, Lance, and Liam, descending order by birth, entered the infirmary room that same meticulous way, and spoke one-after-another, the brain-to-brain baton-passing of ideas like a circuitous route. The energy skipped along by proximity alone. They delivered bundles of half-grown wildflowers they had gathered themselves, color-coordinated so that Luka presented a vase of red-for-love and Lance presented a vase of yellow-for-joy and Liam presented a vase of white-for-healing, all with the same deep gesture, the same keen smile, and the same ruffle of peridot wings.

Of course, Roland was with them. Marianne was mummified by bandages and her wound, sewn shut in three places along three distinct virgules, was slathered in aloe and blanketed by yarrow. The last thing she wanted at this point was ebullient company—even if it was her fiancé. But he did that vivacious twirl with his wonderfully aureate locks and Marianne’s annoyance melted into a small smile of relief.

She always thought of Roland at a distance. To fall for the aspiring general of the Fairy Kingdom’s military, with his resplendent good-looks, polite speech, gallant mannerisms—well, she never doubted the lingering belief that maybe, just maybe, this was too perfect. _They_ were too perfect.

“I’m glad you weren’t killed, Buttercup,” Roland said, taking her hand in his. “Though, you are _mildly_ asymmetrical now. Ah, the problems with imperfection!”

Marianne arched her eyebrow at him, at his flair for dramatics instead of being emotionally honest. “Uh, yeah. I’m feeling fine, by the way—”

“I know you are, where was I—oh, yes, there is no room in the world for imperfection. It’s a shame this happened, a true disaster, I say! But our wedding—once you heal, once that egregious scar is good as new…yes, _that_ will be perfect! _We_ will be perfect!” She hadn’t yet greeted him but already he was strutting towards the door. “Feel better as soon as possible, my love,” he proclaimed, and then he twisted his bangs and blew her a kiss and slipped out the door.

The triplets only lingered to pay their polite farewells, but Marianne asked them, with no prologue to the question, “Does Roland actually love me?”

“What’s not to love about you?” Luka said, then Lance, then Liam.

“Yeah, you’ve got some great qualities.”

“And you’re pretty!”

Marianne furrowed her brow at them. She saw that linger of wanting to say more, of the knowledge behind the different pairs of eyes, colors like varying degrees of wood in the autumnal transition. They were symmetrical and imperfect.

“But,” she goaded.

“But,” said Luka, then Lance, then Liam.

“But, nothing!”

“Yeah, nothing but!”

Marianne crossed her arms. “You’re not just saying that because I’m your future queen, right?”

“Of course not!” the triplets exclaimed in unison. They hurriedly placed the vases of flowers across the room, white to yellow to red in polar opposition of the order they always executed things in, and bolted. Marianne wanted to call out after them but there was little point. She was getting married in a few weeks and, like Roland said, it would be perfect, and—and she would be perfect for him. That's how things were supposed to go, right? To be in love and to be loved?

She thought of tree bark. She thought of the imperfect yet symmetrical contours in the chest plating of the goblin who had saved her life.

Marianne bit her lip until it bled and let it bleed.

      

      

   


	2. recovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the kind comments last chapter! <3 Decided to post this extra early!

* * *

  **ii**. recovery

* * *

    

     

When the wedding was called off, Dawn had made an attempt at dispensing sisterly-affection by brewing amber rum—a tea recipe the elves concocted to deal with the inevitable migraine following extensive nights of drinking the awfully intoxicating and terrifically uplifting snapdragon rum, which was, as Dawn discovered through the perilous trial of not listening to Sunny, not in fact  _tea_ —using sweetleaves and twineroots from the north gardens. She managed to burn only her own hands, as opposed to the appendages of the kitchen staff, which would have been a feat that earned her sister’s most revered praises had Marianne not been cooped up in her bedroom, crying, and was thus not there to adulate Dawn’s progression into independence.

Carefully balancing two plates of tea and almond cookies, she paced the castle to the long foyer and hurried down, brimming near to fullness with both the pride of her work and the determination of rectifying her sister’s sadness. She undid the latch with a skillful placement of her foot, and bumped the door inwards with the canter of her hip.

“Marianne?”

The room was unoccupied. Or, only for a moment, because Marianne’s pixie helpers lifted away from the windowsill and beckoned Dawn over, gesturing wildly to the outside. She set the largesse on the stand beside the mirror, then went to see; far in the distance she noticed the violet shimmer of her sister’s forewings reflecting the sunlight between the emerald ferns and sweetpea flowers, and, she was with—a tall figure, someone Dawn had never seen before, who didn’t resemble a fairy at all.

Driven by her insatiable curiosity, she spread her wings and went to get a closer look.

  

  

  

* * *

  

  

  

Marianne felt nothing less than destroyed when she saw Roland with Cynthia, and played, and used, and miserable—and the plethora of emotions that churned in hard, little whirlwinds through her chest were all that kept her upright as she abandoned her bedroom in favor of the seclusion of the meadow’s edge. There was no discernable reasoning to venture this far into solitude because there was nothing she expected to find. No Roland, telling her:  _Buttercup, this is just a big joke_. No Dawn, no Sunny, no father selectively oblivious to the turmoil retching Marianne’s spirit in two.

She made it as far as the maw of the realms, the thick and burly root that ushered the worlds apart, where she had last left it half a moon ago with a lethal gouge in her torso—and collapsed in the overarching ferns, wishing she could be enveloped in their bind and never emerge again.

“I thought I recognized you, Princess,” a familiar voice said from behind her, and she jumped, spinning to face her company. The creature was there at the maw of the hillock, his tall and lithe figure appearing as a black smudge in the shadow of the grove. His cerulean eyes reflected the inkling of sunlight that broke through the shade here, which fell everywhere and everywhere around them. He glimpsed her once over, noting the dress. “Cold feet?”

Marianne’s throat swelled closed. She put her back to the root and collapsed, the meat of her palms scouring the tears from her eyes.

“Oh,” said the creature quietly, “I see.”

For a while Marianne wept into her arms, a terribly broken thing she was, with her knees to her chest to substitute for something to hold. The creature went to the threshold of their dominions, the edges of his features barely touching the squared bracket of sunlight, and gradually worked his way down to her height as if unsure with his own presence. The air was turning cold, swept in from the east where the sky burned red with the warmth of the approaching summer, yet the wind carried the decay of winter so that here there was only the unspoken past, which had occurred like a season and all the things that happened to people who weren’t them, and the quiet.

He sat in silence until she fell silent as well, shoulders trembling with occasional sobs. “Do you want to talk about it?” he offered, the suddenness of his voice enough to startle even him.

“No.”

“Okay. We can stay here, then.”

There was sunlight all around, fields of semi-wilted plants in the bitter wind and dancing shadows beneath the trees.

“Sometimes,” she started to say to him, “sometimes—like now, I wish you had left me to die.”

“And lose my only friend in the world?”

“We aren't friends,” she shot back, wincing at the sting in her own voice. “I don’t…I don’t even know your name.”

“I am the Bog.  _King_.” He impacted the underside of his chest with a fist, and the wooden echo of the strike ricocheted like a thunderclap in the stillness of the grove. That was how he said it. With enough emphasis that Marianne recognized the familiar tone of someone trying to recite their thoughts from memory.

“Bog,” she said, rolling the word across her tongue, front-to-back. “What are you doing out here?”

“Coincidental border patrol. I like to stretch my wings sometimes.” He flexed his appendages to emphasize his comment, and Marianne heard that distantly familiar buzz of the distal section. “How is your injury?”

“Healed, I guess. Hurts sometimes.”

“If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I’m glad to see you’re doin’ better.”

He held his hand out and she saw his gesture in her peripheral vision; without a moment to contemplate what it meant, she laid her fingers out, allowing him to gently take hold and run the textured pad of his thumb soothingly over her knuckles. His hands felt as rutted in quality as his chest had, back when everything seemed a little clearer to her; at least, she realized, they touched absence of unease. Marianne’s grasp tightened. She was trying to retain the strength of his hand, the ligneous feel of the armor above his skin—but his palms were exposed and unlike wood they were untextured.

“Will you stay with me?” she muttered.

“I shall.”

“Can you…come out of the shadows?”

He exhaled heavily.

“You’ll find that I’m quite hideous.”

“Hideous?” She ran her thumb over his, and said, “I’ve met hideous people…"  _I almost married a hideous person_. "You aren’t that.”

“You’re optimistic.”

After a moment Bog sighed again, but he was buoyed to his feet by the conviction of the princess, and Marianne curiously went with him. From this angle she got to see the full enigma of his body, his long proportions and jagged edges; then, he stepped over the threshold. In the soft sunlight he was made less harsh. Thorns and ashen grays and craggy armor, the muted palettes of a hunter adapted to his environment amplified in the direct gleam of day. He was an unsmiling creature, yet his expression softened when she didn’t immediately reject him.

Marianne said, in the same voice she would use on Dawn, don’t tread over the vines, watch out for the bats when they fly low in the evening tide, trust me,  _just trust me_ —“You’re not hideous.”

The corner of Bog’s lips went up. He meekly placed his hand on her cheek, and his thumb brushed aside a tear managing its escape.

“Marianne!” a distant voice shouted.

Bog flinched back, slipping away into the darkness where his figure melded perfectly into the unlit abode. “I should go,” he said, a diffident tone rising in his voice.

“W-wait, wait a second. When will I—”

But he was already gone. Marianne sighed and forced herself to turn away from the Dark Forest, furiously scrounging wetness from her eyes.

Dawn landed. There were a hundred things she wanted to ask, but only managed, “Hey, why’d you fly off?”

“I, uh—wanted to—get some air. Be alone. That sort of thing.”

Dawn fidgeted. She was unsure if calling her sister’s bluff was a smart decision and instead said, “Oh, well, not so alone that you won’t come back and have some tea with me, I hope? I made it myself!"

Marianne allowed a smile that wouldn't return so easily, not once the day was over, and pulled her sister into her arms.

     

   

   

* * *

  

  

  

There was something Marianne was sure about, before her mother and after Roland: it was impossible to be emotionally gated off forever. Love was the old familiarity of nature, though that was her father’s worldview alone, so maybe  _he_  was why she responded with such hostility to anything that resembled the natural order of How Things Worked. Still, for as much as she went for the throat of emotional dissonance, Marianne knew that substituting swordplay and blindfolds for curtseys and dresses was a physical manifestation of the plausibly psychoanalytical need to be forever protective of herself; never again would she take her eyes off the world, never again would she let it think her guard was anything but up, shackled closed by chains parallel to those of love that she only  _thought_  was real until it wasn’t.

She woke up most mornings in her empty bed, to the thought that if she moved she would probably die, because the world was always out to get her. It would strip her defenses. It would strip away like a desperate animal barreling into the barricaded doors, begging,  _let me in, let me in and embrace the order of how this is, of how this would always be, Marianne. Let me in so I can tear you apart._

There was no real metaphor in that, either. She knew the world was out to get everybody. It was a matter of how most days felt particular to her, targeted down by the same unguided happenstance which ushered the world into existence—that predestined equilibrium of chance and inevitability. It was with that same certainty she was brought pain, and it was with that same certainty that Marianne knew she would never let her guard down again.

  

   

   

* * *

  

  

  

The heat of the spring loomed thick in the meadow even as the sun began to set behind the denticulated horizon of the Dark Forest, casting the field where Marianne trained in wide, swarthy shadow. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours the night before. It showed in the heavy depressions under her eyes, noticeable even through the makeup. Her pixies flittered around as she struck the pressure points of an upright log, sliced from the thin canopy branches and repurposed with clay at its base to withstand the force of her blows. She imagined blond hair and green eyes, and projected them onto the face of the dummy to ensure her sword always landed with conviction. Thrust, parry, strike. Repetition to quell the indignation of her predicament as the fairy who abandoned her beloved on the altar.

(But what right did he have to show up to it, knowing what he did?)

“Must we always meet like this?” a familiar voice asked suddenly.

Marianne didn’t flinch this time. It was something she had learned to do the moment its relevancy became apparent; instead, she slammed her blade into the log’s apex, splitting it in two down to the mesial, and drew away from the dummy, leaving her sword lodged in what was, in her mind’s eye, Roland’s torso.

Bog was perched on the root that separated their worlds. “Good control,” he said thoughtfully, “though, your footin’ could use some work. If your weapon is parried, you’ll be thrown off balance.”

“Do you… _know_  how to spar?” she asked, shielding her eyes from the sunlight that poured through the tree line.

“If I’m not a force to be feared, I can’t protect my kingdom.” Bog rose from his crouched position and tapped the root with his staff. “That, and I learned from my father.”

“Wish I could say the same.” Marianne became acutely aware of the fact he was looking at her, and her throat went dry. She forced herself to swallow and tried, “What brings you out here? To where I happen to be?”

Bog gestured to the primroses that bloomed stubbornly along the border of their realms. “I meant not to disturb you, Princess. I was busy cullin’ the plants and saw you ventin’ some frustrations on that defenseless log.”

Marianne glanced over and saw the troop of goblins who sliced away at the flowers that would rebloom in full every week until the height of the summer. One of the beasts looked, quite drastically, like a fish out of water, and it waved its hand wildly at her.

“You didn’t,” she said, “disturb me, that is. It’s… _nice_  to see you, actually.”

Bog’s expression shifted minutely. Marianne squinted against the sunlight and could have sworn she saw the pressed edge of his lips curve up, but when she blinked the almost-smile was gone, forced, she imagined, back into its place like noble heredity.

“It is rare to receive such acceptance,” he said coyly, “almost as if we’ve become friends. Officially.”

“Yes, well, you saved my life and—I have no way of repaying that. Friendship is…about all I have to offer, unless you want a boutonniere.” She rubbed her hands together. “Actually, I’m pretty terrible at making those, so…”

“Friendship will do.”

Marianne didn’t know why that made her feel elated from her head to her feet, a sensation parallel to taking flight. The floating and falling through the wind. That weightlessness. “Since you’re here, maybe you could show me a move or two?” she suggested, going to the log and prying her sword free.

“Yes, well, it’s difficult to say no when you’re doin’ that— _thing_ , with your mouth—”

She put her hand on her hip and her lips curled up. “Smiling?”

“Uh, yeah.  _That_. Very…” Bog clutched his staff with both hands to give them something to do. “Very charmin’.”

He spread his battered wings and flew down to meet her; though it was his turn to trespass into opposing territory, it was, technically, by invite of the queen-heir herself, and thus nullified the rules before it nullified his guttural desire to flee. This place was much too bright for him. The ecosystem too sensitive. Still, he was drawn towards Marianne by that smile that never left her face, always half-upturned, the very end of a waning moon cast on its back. No one ever  _smiled_  at him unless it was his mother with her fingers crossed behind her back about her intentions.

“Tell me, then,” he said. “How much do you already know?”

Marianne hefted her sword up, and the tip of the blade ghosted along the centerfold of his chest to the apex of his sternum. She could easily sink the cutlass in. Easily end it all right here. Yet her expression was without ill-intent when she said, “I’d prefer to show.”

Bog struck her sword aside, and within that second they were sparring, glancing weapons and exchanging goads, meeting flame with flame and jest with jest.

Dawn hadn’t meant to see them. She was near the border searching out poppy flowers for an arrangement her father wanted in the foyer of the grand hall, when she heard Marianne shout and receive a shout in return, and she followed the metallic twangs of metal on metal to the small clearing by the root of the Dark Forest. There was an unmistakable laugh; the airy kind, swollen with delight. Whatever Marianne was doing, she was having _fun_.

Dawn fluttered behind a veil of lavender and gazed out. Her sister was with that tall man again, trading blows, sword-on-staff—she realized now he was a fae from the Dark Forest, had to be with all that rugged armor, but it was nice to see her sister laughing again, so Dawn pretended to look the other way. She would pursue the topic later that night anyway, when they were cornered off in Marianne’s bedroom splitting almond cookies—increasing the pressure, wanting to know everything about him. She would get her answers, and they would promise not to tell Dad, not yet, not like this, and the pixies would giggle and Marianne would get flushed from the immature insinuation of adult situations that were  _not_  happening, no matter what her perverted mind liked to think.

Dawn would realize she finally had her sister back, like Roland had never happened at all.

    

  

    


End file.
